A Quality-of-Service Architecture for Future Grid Computing Applications

The Next Generation Grid applications will demand Grid middleware for a flexible negotiation mechanism supporting various ways of Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees. In this context, a QoS guarantee covers simultaneous allocations of various kinds of different resources, such as processor runtime, storage capacity, or network bandwidth, which are specified in the form of Service Level Agreements (SLA). Currently, a gap exists between the capabilities of Grid middleware and the underlying resource management systems concerning their support for QoS and SLA negotiation. In this paper we present an approach which closes this gap. Introducing the architecture of the Virtual Resource Manager, we highlight its main QoS management features like run-time responsibility, co-allocation, and fault tolerance.